Howl (1912); Rilke's First Elegy
- Mae
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?
WHO, if I cried out, might hear me – among the ranked Angels? Stephen Cohen
Who, if I should cry, would hear me then from amongst the order of angels? Martin Travers
What angel, if I called out, would hear me? Gary Miranda
And if I cried, who'd listen to me in those angelic orders? A. Poulin
Who, if I howled, would hear me among the choirs of angels?
Translation is a science. It is an art. It's transfiguration. It's terribly imperfect.
Some translations are technical — they capture the verb tense, syntax, declension, and so on with exacting standards. Other translations are more poetic — they want the reader to feel the way a native speaker might feel as they read the poem, but they aren't as concerned with precision.
Martin Travers approached the Elegies with a scalpel; Gary Miranda approached them with a stethoscope. To my senses, there's a difference between dissection and diagnosis. For example, here is an excerpt from Travers as he interrogates Rilke's first line of his First Elegy:
The Elegy begins with a plaintive interrogation, “wer”, which is linked to a conditional “wenn ich schriee” (and the speaking breath pauses between the two) and separated by a caesura, the first of many that establish the cogitative thrust of the poem. “Schreien” has no simple equivalent in English. The translators avoid dictionary definitions such as “shout”, “yell” or “shriek”. Some choose “scream” (N/K), which is the most literal meaning of “schreien” ..., but this is an angular form of utterance directed outwards, and suggests, perhaps, emotional imbalance. “Cry out” (R/S) and “cry aloud” (S/W) are attempts to capture the demonstrative quality of “schreien”, but the simpler “cry” is more in keeping with the dignified interiority of the speaking subject. Phonetically, the initial line ascends with an increasing density of sound, the pinched vowels deepening as the line develops, with the second syllable of “schriee” onomatopoeically transmitting the cry.
In contrast, here is Malachi Black's review of Gary Miranda's translation of the Elegies as a whole:
Rilke speaks through Gary Miranda as through a microphone, with an unprecedented combination of utterly transfixing clarity, propulsive urgency, and emotive concentration. Nowhere else in English—nowhere else—have the Elegies achieved such unrelenting, enveloping intensity. This is a mind-and life-altering book. Much more than a translation, this is a work of total reincarnation.
I've read Miranda's translation of the "Ninth Elegy" countless times. I own two different printings of it. Black was right: it feels urgent, despite the fact that I'm reading it a century after it was published.
Miranda unlocked Rilke for me.
Rilke understood and articulated how painful and how beautiful it is to be human. He saw that we have the power to break everything and to mend everything. He felt the existence of a higher power, but struggled to understand it. He marvelled at the earth and the cosmos. He wove emotion into something almost tangible, using language.
There's something about Rilke's deftness with language that inspires my sense of kinship with him. It's a shared love of words, and syntax, and flow that was my initial motivation, to translate the Elegies myself (in 2018), but as I moved forward, I found that I wanted to understand them on as many levels as possible. I wasn't satisfied with a surface-level understanding, or even an intuitive interpretation, I wanted to understand everything: cultural context, history, Rilke's life, geography, early 20th century German language, all of it.
For a similar, yet totally different, take on this topic, read the blog post "Lost in Translation" by Lydia See. They include a fascinating example of "lay translation," a German high schooler's translation of the First Elegy.
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